


Ghost

by Monochromely



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, still salty about endgame 2k19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 14:01:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18779725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monochromely/pseuds/Monochromely
Summary: On the night before they're set to time travel, Natasha slips into Steve's room.





	Ghost

She slips into his room all ghostlike, her bare feet nimble, shadows turning circles beneath her green eyes.

Natasha.

Steve puts his book down on the nightstand as she steals into his bed and puts his arm around her shoulder when she steals into that space, too. He’s been away from the compound for so long—running, cowering, playing at moving on—and she’s been _here_ , holding what’s left of the world on the curvature of her spine.

He leans down and presses his lips to her smooth forehead. It’s the least he can do.

“You should be sleeping.” She looks up at him with a wry smile tilted on the corner of her mouth; it never quite reaches her eyes. “We’re jumping into a quantum vortex tomorrow, y’know.”

“I could say the same of you,” he teases back. It’s always so easy with her. It’s always so easy to be himself. “You kinda look like shit, Romanoff.”

“What gave me away? The dark circles under my eyes or my untended roots?” She’s playing now, all mischief and fun, but Steve has to stop himself, has to remind himself of what she covers up so expertly with a smile and a quip. He’s seen her making jokes with bullets in her damn body.

“A little bit of both,” he says softly, tugging at the blonde end of her braid before letting it slip between his fingers. “And you... you just look _exhausted_ , Nat. When’s the last time you had a good night’s sleep?”

Or a meal that wasn’t a peanut butter sandwich?

Or a conversation that wasn’t about distributing resources to struggling civilians?

Or a damn day that didn’t end with you shattered in a thankless job even Nick Fury might have blanched at?

 _Natasha_ , he wants to ask her, _when will you ever realize that you’re good?_

“I’ll sleep when we undo this mess,” she replies, meeting his gaze evenly. Her hands are collapsed together in her lap like a broken temple. She scrapes one thumb over the other. “When everyone’s here again.”

It’s optimistic—something she has always teased him for being.

“That’s a tall order,” he murmurs back, and she immediately stiffens against him, a hardness in her face, her eyes, even as she searches his own.

“You don’t think we can do it?”

Steve shakes his head.

“No, I know we can do it—dammit, we _have_ to do it—it’s just... it’s a lot to place on yourself.” 

He moves his hand from her shoulder and skims it up and down her arm, recapturing the scars he’s traced hundreds of nights before: bullet wounds and the signatures of sundry knives—stories of a young woman who has been fighting all her damn life. He stills his fingers on her knuckles and aches to notice that they’re purple and blue from the time she’s recently put into the gym. She’s gone every morning, Banner once told him—working at a punching bag until it was time to help Stark with tactical logistics, and then returning in the evening just to do it again.

Clint said to just let her be; she was working something out in each motion, each well-timed jab of her fist.

(They guessed rightly at anger and grief; they’ve channeled each of those things into their own fists, too. Never in a million years would they have imagined that she was steeling herself up for Vormir—punch by punch by punch.)

“Someone’s gotta do it, Steve,” she whispers, her voice so small and young that he almost flinches to hear it, that he can scarcely believe it’s an admission coming from _her_.

Vulnerability is not one of the sheathes Natasha Romanoff chooses for herself.

It’s the one she scarcely lets others see, hiding it away when people turn corners, drowning it in a joke, a smile, a mask.

“You don’t have to do it alone, you know,” he pleads, his voice tight and strained— _helpless_.(She’s been doing it alone for five years now. All platitudes are worse than late; they're _meaningless_.) “We’re here for you... I am."

Her fingers tense beneath his at this, but she doesn’t move away.

Intimacy has been hard won between them.

They used to flinch at each other’s touch.

“I know,” she says simply. “You’re my family—all of you... I’d do anything to protect that.”

(If he had known that this was the last night they’d ever be together, he would have told her that she didn’t have to prove it. He would have been selfish. He would have asked her to stay. _Please_.)

“I know,” he echoes her, pressing his chin on top of her head. She’s so warm in his arms, so present, so here. (She'll be a ghost tomorrow, the empty space on his right side and eleven years worth of memories seizing through his mind's eye. Her striking smile. The way she lovingly fingered a glock. The mischief that swirled behind her emerald green eyes when she was amused. Her absentminded habit of running a thumb over the scar on her lower lip when she was deep in thought. The swiftness of her hands as she triaged civilians after some catastrophe or another. The rare softness in her voice as she spoke to them. She would tell him, grinning,  _See you in a minute._ He would miss her for many minutes more.)

“You’re the very best of us, Nat.”

**Author's Note:**

> I needed some Steve/Nat catharsis, tbh. ;-;


End file.
